1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system. More specifically, the present invention is directed to a computer implemented method, system, and computer usable program code for controlling transmission of data over an asymmetric communication network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, there is no doubt that the Internet has changed the way people and businesses communicate. For many people and businesses, electronic mail (e-mail) has virtually replaced traditional letters and even telephone calls as the preferred choice of correspondence. Every day, billions of e-mail messages are sent on the Internet. E-mail has been the most rapidly adopted form of communication ever known. In less than two decades, it has gone from obscurity to mainstream dominance.
The availability of extensive e-mail distribution channels makes it possible to provide a relatively fast, convenient, and cost efficient means of communication between parties. Also, a party may include an attachment with an e-mail to transmit a variety of different objects, such as documents, images, audio, video, or other content. When a party attaches lengthy documents, digital photographs, audio files, or video clips to an e-mail for transmission, the e-mail attachment tends to be rather large. However, there are network restrictions that may make the transfer of such large e-mail attachments very cumbersome and taxing for the network communication channels.
In addition, an ever increasing number of message handling applications are starting to encode or dump these large documents and multi-media objects, such as compressed or uncompressed audio and video files, directly into the message body, itself. These message handling applications dump these large objects into the message body because difficulties may exist when these large objects are handled indirectly in e-mail attachments. Furthermore, people-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications normally use a non-attachment format type. Consequently, even the message body of an e-mail may become too large and cumbersome for the network communication channels to transfer properly.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have an improved computer implemented method, system, and computer usable program code for effectively increasing overall capacity of network communication channels to efficiently transfer large e-mail message bodies and attachments or any other large data download.